The impacts of social media on destination branding. Case study based on Hanoi city – the capital of Vietnam.

The purpose of the thesis was to discover the current situation of social media in destination branding with a use case of a developing city in Vietnam while weighing the impacts of social media marketing brings to advertise the destination. In the theoretical chapters of the thesis, the author aimed to understand the general state of social media at the moment. Moreover, the author wanted to understand the impacts that social media has on the image of Hanoi. So that he could utilize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages affecting directly to the image of Hanoi. There were a few studies that only focus on the general picture of the relationship between social media marketing and destination branding. However, they did not concentrate on the specific purpose of the effectiveness of social media marketing in a destination. According to the data which was collected after six interviews, the author had an overview of the current impacts of social media marketing and the ways of improving them from the experts in this field. Combined with previous studies, the influences of social media on the destination have been seen. Besides, there are more suitable proposals to improve and promote the image of Hanoi in the future. At the end chapter of the thesis, the author also gave a few pieces of advice as a guideline to build an effective social media marketing plan